A Guide Harnessing Voice Of Customer For Continuous Innovation

When active listening creates positive customer and business outcomes too.

Fantastic product experiences usually leave an impression. You can instantly recognize that they are not only customer-focused to meet expectations but also complete delighters that frequently 'wow' you!

Fortunately for me, I’ve had a great run using fantastic products and services that usually meet or exceed expectations. You know what these experiences are like:

Uber: Quick Convenient Journey

Touching down at a foreign airport, only to find your Uber immediately, taking you door-to-door to you intended destination. Meanwhile, everyone else is queueing for a more expensive taxi.

• Pain: Unable to get to your hotel fast to enjoy the rest of your day.

• Gain: Fast and cheap ride to hotel with ease.

Amazon: Last Minute Purchase

Solo parent at home, acquiring that one grocery item that you couldn’t find at-home, needed to bake a perfect cake for your kid’s birthday. Delivered same-day, just-in-time for you to place in the oven before guests arrive.

• Pain: Unable to find a scarce ingredient needed for a crucial event.

• Gain: The most convenient way to buy your required ingredients, without leaving your child without supervision.

Wise: Foreign Cash and Currency

Converting foreign currency overseas that is required immediately after you land at the airport. You withdraw from the nearby ATM at the airport with minimal fees.

• Pain: Expensive foreign exchange fees from untrusted parties. Risky to carry local cash to bring on a plane trip before exchange.

• Gain: Local currency immediately available to you with no risk and low fees.

Rarely, I've encountered distressing experiences that I hope no one, myself included, ever faces again. Let me share one such ordeal: a dismal food delivery mishap that no product manager should subject their users to.

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The Tale of The Penang Curry: Lost in Delivery

Photo by Rowan Freeman on Unsplash

A few years ago, with family visiting and time scarce, dining in became the plan. Turning to a local food delivery app, a familiar tool from my overseas jaunt, I hunted for a meal, armed with vouchers from a previous order mishap.

Spotting a nearby restaurant, a 15-minute drive away, I opted for delivery to entertain guests at home. Promised a 35 to 45-minute wait, our hunger grew as time elapsed with no sign of our meal.

Emotions ran high: family tired and hungry, myself, a tad stressed, primarily vexed with the delivery app. Tracking the vehicle's progress, hope flickered as the icon stalled just minutes away.

Contacting support yielded little relief. A chatbot's hollow responses led to a futile conversation with an agent, promising action but delivering only frustration.

One hour passed, no food in sight, patience wearing thin. The revelation of the driver's car trouble dashed any remaining hope. Offered a voucher as compensation, I declined, opting for an immediate refund and severing ties with the app for good.

I decided to draw out my experience after that whole ordeal, using a basic journey map, based on Positive, Neutral, and Negative sentiment. See below:

Abridged Customer Journey Map: Food Delivery Experience

…and yes, I haven’t installed the app since. I’ve found better alternatives!

How Could This Have Been Better?

The experience with the food delivery app left me with an extremely bitter taste, prompting a retrospective on how it could be improved. I left plenty of feedback in my chatbot: I sincerely hope that someone picked it up for their backlog!

Firstly, better communication and transparency regarding the delay would have alleviated frustration. Timely updates from the support team or the delivery driver could have managed expectations and provided reassurance during the wait.

Secondly, a more efficient and responsive customer support system would have been useful. A seamless transition from automated responses to human interaction, coupled with proactive problem-solving, could have salvaged the situation. Empowering support agents with the authority to take immediate action and resolve issues swiftly would have prevented much of my dismay.

Lastly, investing in driver training and contingency plans for unforeseen circumstances such as car breakdowns could prevent similar incidents in the future. Maybe they can give the order to another driver who can pick it up off them? Who knows. Ensuring drivers are equipped to handle emergencies would have upheld a level of service reliability and trust.

Ultimately, by prioritising near real-time communication, customer service, mitigations and operational preparedness, the food delivery app could have turned a disastrous experience into an opportunity to build loyalty and trust. After all, they should have known I would have been at risk of churning: I had a voucher already from the missing items in a previous delivery!

Reasons Why Feedback Is Often Ignored

Amidst the ever-evolving market dynamics and customer preferences, many businesses struggle to effectively harness customer feedback as an invaluable resource to learn from. This is due to mainly 3 reasons:

1. Lack of Customer-Centric Culture

Sometimes you may find yourself in an organisation where customer focus is spoken about, but never really lived in the values of the employees.

Usually there are some tell-tale signs that indicate this lack of customer-centric culture, which also cause a much more wider problem: “organisational entropy”, which is the natural tendency of organizations to become disordered, inefficient, or resistant to change over time.

Take a look at the below, and see if any of them apply to your organisation:

1. Poor Communication Channels: Product managers do not establish clear channels for collecting and communicating customer feedback within the organization, leading to a lack of awareness and understanding of customer needs among team members.

2. Siloed Structures: Departments or teams within the organization may operate in isolation, making it difficult to share and utilize customer insights across the entire organization.

3. Bureaucratic Hurdles: Complex approval processes and bureaucratic red tape can slow down the implementation of customer-driven initiatives, leading to delays in responding to customer feedback.

4. Resource Constraints: Limited resources, whether financial, human, or technological, can hinder the organization's ability to invest in tools, training, or initiatives aimed at capturing and leveraging the voice of the customer.

5. No Action On User Feedback: management disregard user feedback and continue to make decisions based on assumptions or internal preferences.

6. Limited Customer Engagement: your team members or peers don’t speak to customers proactively on opportunities, instead only reacting when feature requests are escalated.

7. Disregard for User Experience: Product managers prioritize technical specifications, sales demands or internal processes over-optimizing the user experience, resulting in products that are difficult to use or navigate, or are inconsistent with design systems or UX best practices.

2. Fragmented / Unmeasured Feedback Channels

Feedback from customers come from all kinds of channels, many of which may not be easily transposed into meaningful insights or data pipelines in companies. Many organisations do not invest in synthesising the multiple inputs into meaningful insights or outcomes.

Consider the following sources of feedback:

• Marketing or CRM:

  • Website Behaviour: how your users interact with your website, either the sales and marketing collateral, or the product itself

  • Live Chat: how your users chat and interact within live chat, as well as any reviews or ratings provided

• Customer Care

  • Customer Support Interactions: call data or recordings of common or recurring issues, as well as emails received

• Platforms:

  • App Reviews: user feedback on the service from app store reviews, whether positive or negative, as a source for improvement

  • Social Media Listening: mentions and comments about the service on social media channels

• Research:

  • Survey data: qualitative and quantitative feedback from email or in-app surveys

• Product:

  • In-App Feedback: data supplied in feedback forms of in-app experience

  • User Interviews: Conduct interviews to understand user experiences.

  • Data Analytics: Use data to track user behaviour and identify areas for improvement.

Integrating these touch points and channels into meaningful insights can be difficult, especially for organisations that have a low appetite to invest further, limited by shorter-term profitability goals where return on investment and payback thresholds are low.

3. Purely Capitalist Pursuit Towards Profitability

Your company’s pursuit of profitability may often take precedence over other considerations, including actively listening to customer feedback. Businesses, particularly those under pressure to deliver short-term financial results, may prioritize initiatives that directly contribute to the bottom line, relegating feedback integration to a secondary or tertiary concern.

This profit-centric mindset can manifest in various ways:

• Short-Term Focus: Businesses may prioritize initiatives that promise immediate returns, such as cost-cutting measures or quick product releases, over longer-term investments in customer feedback analysis and product refinement.

• Quarterly Targets: The pressure to meet quarterly financial targets set by investors or stakeholders can lead businesses to allocate resources primarily to activities that generate immediate revenue, rather than those focused on improving customer satisfaction or loyalty through feedback implementation.

• Cost Considerations: Investing in comprehensive feedback analysis tools or hiring dedicated personnel to manage customer feedback channels may be perceived as costly endeavours, particularly for businesses operating on tight budgets or facing financial constraints.

• Market Competition: In highly competitive markets, where companies are vying for market share and profitability, there may be a reluctance to divert resources towards feedback integration efforts, especially if competitors are not visibly prioritizing similar initiatives.

As a result, VoC is overshadowed by short-term financial goals, hindering the ability of businesses to fully leverage feedback for continued innovation to create sustainable advantages.

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6 Steps to Establishing Voice of Customer

So in light of all these challenges, we ask ourselves:

How can businesses leverage the voice of the customer to not only drive product innovation, but also foster sustainable growth and success?

Below, I offer 6 key ways to move towards a more sustainable measurement, synthesis, and action for Voice of Customer.